Sunday, April 17, 2011

Egyptology News goes audio!

You can now listen to Egyptology News. I am very interested in making online content available for the visually impaired so I have added an Odiogo feed to Egyptology News. Thanks to Kate Phizackerley for pointing me at Odiogo.

Just click on the "Listen Now" icon at the head of each post to listen to it.

The voice used is male and American whereas I am female and English, but that scarcely seems to matter! This seems like an excellent solution and I hope that people find it useful. The only serious downside is that I only post experts from articles so if you want to gain access to the entire article you will still need to click the link to go to the source, which is very unlikely to have an audio option. Still, rather better than nothing!

So far Odiogo seems to be doing a great job of dealing with Egyptian and other difficult names. I was worried about how it would handle block quotes but it picks them up, announcing opening and closing quotes to let you know which material is quoted and which isn't. For anyone planning to use the audio alternative instead of reading the text it will be helpful to have a good grasp of how I format the content on the blog in order to listen out for the title, the source website, any comments and the block quote etc.

I hope that we will be able to add something for Egyptological eventually.

If you try it, or pass it on to someone visually impaired to try, please can you let me know how you or they get on with it? I would be most grateful for any feedback. andie [at] oddthing . co. uk.

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Welcome to the Egyptology News archive

Introduction to Egyptology News

This blog was set up in 2004 to aggregate news about Egyptology and related topics from online sources on a regular basis. It was closed finally in September 2013 due to other commitments. It has been left open as an archive, but comments have been disabled.